With recent advancements in the field of medical science, various surgical and diagnostic procedures can now be performed by use of minimally invasive techniques. Such minimally invasive techniques may require small incisions to insert endoscopic or laparoscopic surgical instruments through the patient's skin into a body cavity that need to be operated upon. At least one of the endoscopic and/or laparoscopic tools includes an in-built camera to capture video images of the body cavity. The camera may enable a physician to navigate the endoscopic and/or laparoscopic surgical tools through the body cavity to reach an anatomical region on which the surgical or diagnostic procedure is to be performed. Other endoscopic and/or laparoscopic tools may perform the surgical operations on the tissues of the anatomical region.
In certain scenarios, during such surgical or diagnostic procedures, smoke may appear in the body cavity. For instance, when localized heat is applied to the anatomical region by use of the endoscopic or laparoscopic surgical instrument, temperature in the body cavity may change. This change in temperature may lead to the formation of mist or smoke inside the body cavity. The appearance of the mist or smoke in the body cavity may hinder the visibility of the physician. Consequently, the quality of the video footage captured by the endoscopic camera may deteriorate due to the mist or smoke. Hence, detection and removal of such mist or smoke that may appear during the surgical or diagnostic procedures may be essential. However, the detection of mist or smoke may be prone to many intrinsic and extrinsic challenges. An example of the intrinsic challenge in the smoke detection may include frequent changes in appearance of the smoke. Various examples of the extrinsic challenges in the smoke detection may include, but are not limited to, motion blur (that may be caused by motion of camera, surgical gauze, and/or surgical tools), halo effect, and/or smoke-ish appearance of white colored tissues. Therefore, to overcome the aforementioned challenges, there is a need for a method and/or system to detect smoke in the video footage captured by the endoscopic camera, and improve the quality of the video footage.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of described systems with some aspects of the present disclosure, as set forth in the remainder of the present application and with reference to the drawings.